Wednesday, April 30, 2008

christina carter

"Texas Working Blues is an impressive coup for the burgeoning Blackest Rainbow cassette / CD-R label. It might well seem like over-the-top claim to make having only lived with this tape for a short while, but this is Christina Carter’s finest solo material yet. It doesn’t top the enchantment of the Carter/Murray/Carter Charalambides line-up, it’s too song-based for that comparison, but it isn’t too far in the wake of it.

Despite the title and the Texan-referencing liners, there doesn’t feel like there’s a profound Texas influence in the expected sense of the word. It’s more in the way she interleaves sun-fried guitar and the vocals-through-haze shimmer. “Bird’s Nest” makes this intangibly explicit, lost somewhere between Autumnal wanders and summer smog. The jangle of quiet guitars and breathy vocals is offset with lead guitar parts that sound like her Charalambides partner Tom Carter may not responsible for the most skyward parts of their chemistry. All the usual Christina Carter superlatives apply here, only tenfold – gorgeous tunes, dust rising in sunshine sounds, clipped notes of honeyed 70s psych and with enough disassociation to keep it non-pop. There are flavours of Richard Youngs’ primitive-weird-traditional “Autumn Response” vibe across “Texas Working Blues”. The mix of weird sidereal guitar sounds with the gentle feedback lulling and wire-crawling electric lead lines gives Carter a perfect balance between worlds. 10/10" scott mckeating (foxy digitalis)